Rising tide Most Downtown flooding linked to man-made climate change: experts BY YANNIC RACK Downtown Manhattan has seen one of the steepest increases in the country of flooding caused by sea-level rises resulting from manmade climate change, according to a recent study, and experts say the problem will only get worse, even as post-Sandy flood protections for the area remain largely unfunded. A report by New Jersey-based nonprofit Climate Central found a dramatic spike in recent years in the amount of flooding in the area around The Battery in recent years attributable to human-induced increases in sea level. One of the authors of the report described how small increases in sea level can turn otherwise harmless weather into street-swamping floods. “When a street floods with saltwater, and you can’t drive home, or you
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March 24 – April 6, 2016
have to sandbag your store, human instinct looks for the nearby cause: it was a very high tide, or a strong wind blew from the wrong direction,” said Benjamin Strauss, vice president for sea level and climate impacts at Climate Central. “But what if the tide or the wind were not enough to tip the balance? What if the waters would not have crossed the last lip, the critical threshold, without a few inches of boost?” In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a group of scientists found that the worsening of tidal flooding in coastal communities in the U.S. is largely due to greenhousegas emissions and will only increase over the coming decades. In a separate report analyzing the findings, researchers used the data to calculate that around three quarters
Mayor’s Office
This map shows the routes of the mayor’s planned ferry network that is set to launch in 2017.
of the flooding now plaguing cities along the East Coast would not be happening if it wasn’t for sea-level rise caused by human emissions. The Battery was one of eight areas studied which saw such flooding double since 1950. Even though sea-level rise contributes only a limited amount to the huge surges accompanying
storms like Sandy, the impact can nonetheless make a critical difference, according to Strauss. “A higher starting level means that the same tide, the same storm surge, goes higher than it otherwise would have,” said Strauss. “Tide gauges dotting our bays and beaches have been recording this shift.” And while tidal flooding is already
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